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Kanye West Announces Partnership with Adidas

It’s "official, non-official, official"—Kanye West announced on the Angie Martinez Show that he signed a deal with Adidas. The partnership is a new step in West’s future as a designer and creative. It isn’t a strange pairing, as Adidas has a history of working with designers like Yohji Yamamoto, who helms the Y-3 collection, and collaborations with the likes of Kazuki Kuraishi, Takahiro Miyashita, Jeremy Scott, and Mark McNairy.

West’s Adidas deal comes in the wake of some very vocal judgements against fashion industry heavyweights like designer Hedi Slimane, François Pinault (CEO of Kering Group), Bernard Arnault (CEO of LVMH), and Nike CEO Mark Parker. We’ve made the case for why the fashion industry should take West seriously, and his Yeezus Tour has been punctuated by vitriolic onstage banter against the industry and a corporate culture that he believes doesn’t have his best interests in mind.

This weekend West played back-to-back shows at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where he denounced Nike’s business practices, citing that he needed royalties for his work, mainly designing the wildly successful Air Yeezy series of sneakers (much like how Michael Jordan gets royalties from the sales of Jordan Brand shoes). Nike saw things differently, citing the fact that West isn’t an athlete.. The all-red versions of the Air Yeezy IIs, dubbed the "Red Octobers" have yet to see an official release date, and now that West is headed to Adidas, the demand for them will no doubt exacerbate. During Saturday night’s show, he said he would be revealing a new corporate deal on Monday, this looks to be it.

Of the deal, West told Angie Martinez: "The old me, without a daughter, would have taken the Nike deal because I just love Nikes so much. But the new me, with a daughter, takes the Adidas deal because I have royalties and I have to provide for my family."

No word yet on what kind of output West’s Adidas partnership will yield, but the confident artist claimed: "I am going to be the Tupac of product... I’ma be the first hip-hop designer, and because of that... I’ma be bigger than Walmart."